steve carlton writing

I can look at people's accounts online that might connect us. I can swipe away until I find you. I can catch glances and smile and yet keep wondering. I can sacrifice hours of my day contemplating what it might mean. Yet I don't want to look inside of me to see what it is that wants to be nurtured. - Tragically we keep looking everywhere that is outside ourselves to find something that makes us whole, that will keep us going and that is great for the moment, but rarely do we find the strength to go and turn the other way and consider. Consider that the outside isn't going to help with this. That no interaction could ever be sweet enough, that no message or like would fix us like we want it to. The flaw is in the direction. If all the attention was spend looking inside then it would all be different. The interactions would mean more. The messages would be genuine. The time spent would be more useful. After years of introspection I am still dumbfounded sometimes...

I am not really into new years resolutions and that sort of thing, simply because one can always make a change in one's life - there musn't be a new year to start. That is just putting things off for a while and that is lazy and irresponsible, but whatever. There are a couple of things, though, that are difficult to entirely detach oneself from and this is similar. Ten days into the new year, the new decade even, I am tempted to look back for a number of reasons. Last year was full of tests for me, not least the thesis I had to write. I wanted to play basketball to have an exchange of energy and a physical outlet, but I got injured and wasn't able to play from February to August and then when I got back, two months later I got injured again and up to this day I have yet to fully recover from that. I had to adjust my expectations towards my eventual return to basketball and I had to find a different way to relief stress. Similarly, I had to adjust my expectations towards...

Any new occurrence in my environment I immediately understand as an obstacle right now. Granted that an unsual amount of things cluster up sometimes, as life is, I need to be able to ignore things that are hypothetical for now and improve my ability to not see anything that could be a possible opportunity as outright negative. That applies to a friendly get-together with friends for Christmas also. Poor communication habits meets carelessness and thirty minutes into a group chat I can already picture disaster.

Here is where I am at: For about the last two weeks I feel like everything I have been writing is garbage, but that is really to be expected sometimes. I don't think I can expect one thing to be better than the last one all the time and what matters, anyway, is practice and building up a good habit. Habit is a good transition because I feel like I am just now realizing how many bad or unproductive habits I have maintained for God knows how many years without being aware of them. In a sense, I try to fix everything at one. In other words that is just leaving out things that I don't feel so strongly about now out of my daily routine and see how that makes me feel. Yesterday that maybe was a soul-crushing realization, however, today it is an electrifying mist of opportunity. I am remodelling my or rather refocusing my habits to become happier and more successful at the things I care about, including myself. Lastly, I am considering removing my work from wattpad because I h...

I came across this youtuber called "Universal Man" and his series "Man of Action", where he talks about reconfiguring your neurological circuits away from short and spiky reward habits like watching porn, eating junk food, playing video games, celebrity voyeurism, etc. to disciplines, both short and long term, to improve your overall mental health, fitness, career and so on. One of the things I draw from this is that my internet cookies must be quite easy to read because this is not something that I would have searched for myself, but something that I find interesting at the moment. In regards of my thesis at University, which I struggle still to work on, let's just be honest, I started to test more of the topics that Russell Brand talks about in his book "Recovery", which is the main source for my thesis, out for myself. Russell argues that we live in a society today that is almost run by addiction. Sociel media, food, pornography, drugs - everyth...

Yesterday I had a thought about possibly getting rid of my post-it notes that are in front of me basically all day, since I spend a lot of time at my desk. The reason that they are there is because I feel that when I write something down I don't need to remember it all the time and essentially, I can forget it for a little while. Post-its do have the tendency to remain on my desk for about a year, especially when I am not at my best, so you have to consider that how you might use them as a responsible human being might differ from the way that I use them right now. Anyway, yesterday I thought that maybe getting rid of them would be in my best interest because then I would not constantly be triggered when I am looking at them. Now they serve not as I intended to use them, but maybe as they were intended to be used by their inventor (or simply the first person to ever write a note to themselves).  Maybe them stressing me out all the time is useful because eventually I will be so str...

I remember the night that you took me back And the feeling that I had in your bed How I couldn't fall asleep for some time How unreal it all seemed to me that moment I remember thinking this normally doesn't happen And I was incredibly saddened To realise that part of me never wanted you to take me back To go through all that pain one more time I remember feeling that it wasn't meant to last And when you fell asleep right away It seemed that you were not as heavyhearted as I was It all happened just a bit too fast Because it was never meant to last Since it was born from lust and not from heart An urge, a desire, a flame But eventually Flames burn out